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>> so good morning. >> good morning. >> thank you for joining us here. today is may sixth, 2024 and besides leading one of the most important organizations in the world taking care of the health of the united states and the world i just want to let you know how tough it has been to compete against mandy when she's one of the world's leading schools of public health in north carolina. and so they have decided that we need a strategy and so they've asked mandy to be the keynote speaker at their graduation. >> that's right. i will be there in a few weeks. >> thank you. so we like to remind everyone

every year that more than 50% of all the economic growth in the world can be traced to public health and medical research, so, yes, every life is precious but it also has driven the world and the economy for the last 200 years so we are ten months in to the assignment. what has surprised you and what hasn'tou surprised you in these ten months, mandy? >> first, thank you for having me here and opening up this conference in o discussion about public health. i think we all got to know public health in a new way through the pandemic and we are in a good moment, a new chapter and i think we realized that the health and security work and our

economy are linked and we saw big and small ways in the number of years and as cdc is turning a new chapter and we are thinking about how do we meet this new moment we need to be able to respond to whatever health threats, heart disease is the biggest killer out there or a virus. i spent weeks on aviant flu. we need core capacity to respond to those health threats and it can't be just in time. these are things that take time to build, data capacity the laboratory, the workforce and the response capability, so what i'm trying to do is make sure our folks know that we are in a new moment. we have lots of amazement tools with the innovation that has been going on but we have to make sure we are investing in this work. >> so the demographics of the world we're in today have

changed so dramatically. and the ten countries with the highest birthrate in the world are all in sub sahara africa and so just one country in subsahara africa and in all the children born in north america, europe, et cetera, and i know that you spend time visiting ethiopia, kenya, et cetera. why have you spent so much time visiting these countries? >> well, the important work of protecting the country's health actually start abroad, making sure that we can identify and stop health threats before they would come to the united states. i was just in ethiopia and they are seeing more and more cases of measles. they've recently had internal conflict and they haven't been able to vaccinate kids as much

and that has a direct impact back to the united states. we've been seeing more cases of measles and, again, that's a lot because of internationalas travl and the levelme of vaccination e are able t to do internationall. so those are kinds of the important work or it's the work back to avian flu. we are looking for genetic changes in viruses all over the world. we want to be able to identify ndit and stop it at its source. and so we are working hard to make sure that we are forward deploying the folks we need internationally to protect us here at home. >> so i don't think everyone has had an opportunity to visit the cdc, security is fairly tight, a number of years ago and i wrote about it last year in a book i may putut out, cures visits to c and it was really an emotional experience for me and to be in

that cdc museum and see an individual who had been kept alive with polio and an iron lung for a number of years and my father had had polio and it's hard for the world to see what goes on in the cdc because it's hard to get security clearance to visit. if you were to communicate and let people understand one to have things that really struck the group i brought there was your situation where they think their situation rooms at the pentagon or at the white house, that the situation room monitoring things all over the world and there are actually people att the cdc than in any emergency had bags packed to go and let's talk aboutk the view f

the cdc that you could share was today. >> sure, well, cdc -- our mission is to protect health and improve lives. a small but mighty team and i will say that it is something where it has to be a team support. we are doing a lot of that work and we do have a lot of visibility but we wouldn't have that visibility unless we had partners to make sure that we have eyes, ears, people to be able to respond to whatever the health threat is and we've made a lot of progress over the course of covid. i think going into that we did not have the visibility we wanted. we didn't have the diagnostic capability. we've -- we've made a lot of strides but we have more work to do and i want to make sure that folks who are thinking about how do we keep our economy strong, how do we keep our workforce healthy, that they think about cdc and public health at large because if we don't invest

foundationally in our health security, everything else can get shaky on top of that. so what we are trying to do at cdc is help folks understand how we are moving into this new moment, learning the lessons of the past, turning our data into action more quickly, communicating clearly and making sure we're investing in those core capabilities, but, again, we need everyone's help in this because we know that protecting health andg improving lives, that's a big job and so i'm grateful for this conversation l and these kinds of forums to e able to do that. >> so people in our conference here in 2024 in may own or control over 3,000 companies. they have tens of millions of employees and i think if you were discussing with them the reasonso for partnership, access

to data, how they can help you and how you can help them. >> good, well, thank you for that opportunity because i think we absolutely need to focus on the employees right in front of us. i think businesses, of course, you want to have a healthy workforce that's productive and so thinking about the health and well-being of them from the very beginning but also particularly if you're a large employer and you're self-ensured, right, it's dollars and cents, having a healthier workforce means more -- more money that you get to use on other parts of your business, so i think there are a tons of things that businesses can do, very basic, right, many of you have been holding flu ngclinics for years. i hope this fall it'll be a flu and covid vaccine clinicker we're already taking steps to update the covid vaccine later this year and we have to c live with it and these are tools.

howol many of your workers are t every winter because their kids get rsv? again, loss of productivity, opportunity, thinking about how to promote vaccination? that's an easy one but also things like mental health, right, how do we work together on improving mental health of our communities? so i think there's a lot of ways that businesses can think about the health and well-being but they also need to be advocates for public health because we can see how in a moment a virus can bring us to our knees. and so just like we need to invest in the military to protect us, we have to invest in public health to protect us as well. >> the challenges -- let's talk domesticallyly now. we know that if you get on the subway in manhattan and go towards the bronx, that you lose life expectancy every minute and

it's tend years shorter in a 20-minute ride. and so defining your life expectancy by the zip code you were born in and it's not just new york and hag. 15 to 20 minute ride will shorten lifeem expectancy and mt extremely is in baltimore where you can go to a wealthy suburb whose life expectancy might be 15 to 20 years more than any other city. how do you deal with this differentials in getting this into our communities? >> well, we certainly know it's a complex issue so there's no one-solution so it is why cdc is focused on in addition to being ready to respond to any health threat, we are focused on two other areas, one is improving mental health. we lost a hundred thousand people to overdose, 50,000 to suicide last year and then the other part is supporting young

families. and the reason we focus on young families is that the -- the part of our lives, zero to ten, that is whenth your lifelong patterns of health are determined and so we really want to make sure mom is having a healthy pregnancy, that our kids are getting vaccinated, our kids are food secure, that they are housing secure and they are getting to the best start in life no matter the zip code and we also have to care about mom and dad's health gpreventing diabetes, heart disease, stopping smoking and that focus, on young families is really important and i think this is where the business community and public health is so much shared alignment there to work on particularly as you think of young families? >> so vaccines, as we've been focused on building the center many washington, d.c. over the last ten years across from the

white house in treasury we have told people, we are so surprised how people don't really fully understand what vaccines have done for the world. and the people that created those vaccines or work on those vaccines and obviously in some cases we've seen challenges to taking those vaccines today, how dodo you see hour ability to communicate the value of these vaccines, one, and how do you see our ability in the future -- >> what incredible advancements and even the fact that we were ablele to go to where we were at the beginning ofin covid to havg vaccine so quickly in a huge scientific marvel and it gives us more platforms to build upon

going forward in the future but i think the core that we need to get to is even the best made vaccine that'ss fast, if it sits on the shelf, it doesn't do us know good so we have been really focused on how do we think about that trust building for folks to understand vaccines ask questions and make sure we are combating misinformation and this is about getting more voices into the conversation. trust is not built overnight, we have to make sure we are link to go trusted voices that can understand issues, we have to be answering questions and we have to make this personal and i do, i'm a mom of a 9 and a 12-year-old, two daughters and i try to talk about what i do for my own family. i think it start there and many of us who could have that individualized personal conversation. it's going the take time to do that but i think it's important, its foundational and ultimately

builds us toward a healthier country. >> so i want to touch on another area, over the years in our various medical foundations we have interacted with a number of leaders from the military particularly when they themselves have been diagnosed with cancer or some other life-threatening disease. in and one of the shocks is the technology level in the medical service system versus the data they have available to them in the military to make decisions. the challenge is how are you moving the cdc today, take advantage of ai and other things, once you get the data, how are you bringing the health care and industry up to the level of some private industry or in the military in some

cases? >> yeah, data is absolutely critical if we are going to protect the health of this country and we've made some progress but i need help from congress both forti resources ad authorities but right now and i've challenged our -- our big health systems across the nation, our -- our ehr partners to really invest here with us because we can do better in terms of data interopperability andd public health has to be at the table. most of my career wasn't spent on public health but the health delivery side and i think we have learned how silos were not our friend. health delivery was sitting over here, public health was sitting some siloed and our data didn't thank you very much to each other. in north carolina i led through the covid c crisis and one of te first things we had to do was stop receiving lab data by fax

machine, yeah, embarrassing. so we've moved that's past. so there's been a lot of investment but we have to keep going. we are really focused this year on getting more electronic case reporting and this allows for faster identification of those health threats and we can to it. the technology exists, we just need to use it. as far as ai, we already are thinking about what are important use cases for ai for public health, think about all of the data that's out there and how do you detect signal to noise, how do we use large language models so we are not using ed syndromic data but how do we also look at what is happening online and conversations on social media that might identify for us a problem that's happening in a community, so lots of opportunity in the future, i'm hopeful for the future but we have to invest and we have to

make sure that we are working together as one team around data. >> so you might also recognize with mandy she was perfectly situated, one hour from dc and one hour fromy, cdc headquarters in atlanta and raleigh, so she's been able to bridge both worlds, thank you for joining us today. >> thank you, everyone. [applause] >> wednesday national public radio president and ceo katherine testifies on accusations of bias in npr which is taxpayer funded. watch subcommittee live at 10:0, c-span now, free mobile video app or online at c-span.org. >> nonfiction book lovers, c-span has a number of podcasts for you. listen to best-selling

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